


The World in Solemn Stillness

by simplyprologue



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Charlotte Fic, Christmas, F/M, Melodrama, Post-Series, Secret Santa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 09:54:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2846795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five days before the Christmas, Mac is approached by the Ghost of Genoa Past with a story. The situation rapidly devolves from there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The World in Solemn Stillness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bashert](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bashert/gifts).



> **A/N:** My contribution to the Newsroom tumblr Secret Santa. This is also cross-posted to tumblr. 
> 
> Merry Christmas, Lisa! If you were wondering at all why I haven't pitched any fic ideas at you lately or why Emily instigated a discussion on what your perfect fic would include... well, I hope this explains some things. I'm so glad we've become such good friends in the past year, and I hope your Christmas is wonderful and fun and all the other things that you are!

It’s not until after that she realizes that she’s allowed herself to fall into a routine. That every day at some point between three and four she pulls on her coat, hangs her scarf around her neck, and grabbing only her wallet, phone, and security card, exits the AWM building to take a walk through Bryant Park. At least five minutes, sometimes as long as twenty.

But the park is right across the street, and she’s gotten to the point of her pregnancy where the office is far too hot and midtown Manhattan in mid-December is definitely cold enough.

Usually Will comes along. Or Jim, or Don, or Sloan, or any of the dozens of anchors and high-ranking producers she’s in charge of now.

But usually Will.

Not today.

She was approached as she was in line at the coffee cart, waiting for her daily cup of questionable vendor hot chocolate. While the year (the whirlwind wedding, Will’s stint in prison, her ascendancy to the President of ACN in the wake of a hostile takeover and Charlie’s death, the announcement of her pregnancy two months later) has given tabloids cause to plaster her face in their shiny pages and her cause to keep a wary eye on the people around her, she wasn’t out with Will. (Mac has learned that if he’s not with her and she’s wearing the same coat and scarf and in the same location, pictures of her are absolutely worthless.) Then she remembered that she’s the President of ACN, and with that, come high-level sources who previously gave stories to Charlie now giving them to her.

Besides, he called her “Ms. McHale,” and not “Mrs. McAvoy.”  

Now she’s staring at the manila envelope of government documents he handed her, wondering how this could happen _twice_ in one year. Nothing appears to be stolen, though, and there’s a vague sense of relief to just have hard copies placed into her hands rather than having things transferred from a government internet. Nothing’s been stamped classified.

Sitting on a cold bench, she leafs through the pages without taking them out.

It’s surveillance. Emails from government accounts. Redacted files.

Things she could FOIA for herself, if she wanted. People she could have tailed. But only if she knew what she was looking for.

“You’ve inherited Charlie Skinner’s ghosts,” he had said, calmly passing the reports and pictures over into her grasp. “I want to see what you’ll do with us.”

“Who are you?” she asked, stepping away from the line but towards the AWM building, falling into step with the man. And smiling, always smiling, as women do to strange men who approach them in parks.

He smiled.

“ _What_ are you?” she amended, clutching the paper cup of hot chocolate close in front mouth, ignoring how the baby is squirming relentlessly inside her in response to the surge of adrenaline pounding through her body.

His smile didn’t change. “Naval Intelligence.”

But hers did, from a polite plaster to a wary grimace. “A spook.”

“Me?”

Mac snorted over the plastic lid covering her drink. “I was raised by British diplomats during the height of the Cold War. I’m well acquainted with your type.”

The agent, at least in his early sixties, she thinks, was balding and bureaucratic in appearance. His hair was combed, his suit pressed, his hands steady. His smile was as readily a weapon as it was an attempt to assuage a very pregnant woman on her own that he was not a threat.

He had laughed in a way that was completely hollow.

“I’m not a spy. I’m a press liaison.”

“And I’m Don Quixote,” she muttered, wondering who in the hell Charlie had brought to her doorstep.

“You’re the daughter of Cold Warriors. You’re still trying to take down the Berlin Wall. It’s why you’ll like the story I brought you.”

“You know my type?” she asked sardonically, sliding a hand into the pocket of her coat with her BlackBerry in it. Unlocking her phone, she pressed Jim’s number on her speed dial, her gloved hand hesitating over the send button.

He laughed again.

“I’m going out on maternity leave in a month. Why now?”

“Because you go out on maternity leave in a month,” he answered in the same tone in which she asked.

“So this can’t wait?”

Her arm tucked the manila envelope close into her side, the thick paper crinkling. Mac tamped down on the absent compulsion to press a hand against where the baby was kicking her feet, reminding herself that it wasn’t the moment to draw attention to her condition. Not that she could hide it, but she didn’t want this meeting including her daughter.

“I don’t think you’ll want to wait,” he said, before stopping short. “I’ll be in touch, Ms. McHale. Merry Christmas.”

Nodding, he shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat, and walked in the opposite direction.

“What’s your name?” she called after him, clutching the envelope over her belly

He didn’t stop, or look back, merely waved before disappearing into a throng of tourists. And so sighing wearily, MacKenzie stopped, and sat down.

Pulling off one of her lambskin gloves (a gift, from Will, when her fingers began to swell and lined with rabbit fur and presented alongside her charcoal lambs wool maternity coat and a red cashmere scarf, because Will doesn’t love or give gifts by halves, especially since the moment she told him about the baby) in frustration she pulls out the top halves of documents and glossy nine by eleven pictures, and quickly it becomes apparent that she holds in her hands the careers of half a dozen Washington officials.

Flicking through the papers she squints at the bottom of the envelope and then carefully fits her fingers in-between two reams of stapled reports, plucking out a business card.

_Shepard Pressman. Office of Naval Intelligence._

Pushing up off the bench, she heads back into the AWM building hoping to god that neither Pruitt nor some small country blows up in the next few hours.

Greeting Millie as cheerily possible, Mac sweeps as gracefully into her office as possible with a thirty-five week fetus jutting out from between her hips. Which is largely without grace, since it appears that the baby is wholly McAvoy in length and other proportions and it never quite hit MacKenzie exactly _how much_ of her height comes from her legs rather than her abdomen. Sighing, which is truly a cover for catching her breath, she moves the sonogram from the appointment this morning’s appointment out of the way and drops of the envelope on top of her desk.

Then she pulls out the ring of keys from the top drawer and crosses her office to Charlie’s filing cabinets.

Decades and decades of dossiers.

First, she has to ascertain if Shepard Pressman was truly one of Charlie’s sources.

The baby keeps kicking; usually the afternoon walk lulls her to sleep but not today’s. Mac keeps a running conversation with Charlotte while her eyes flicker over the lines of information on Shep Pressman.

“No, Mummy doesn’t know if she should trust him either. But like Charlie said, bad guys make good sources,” she muses, reading through Charlie’s spidery script on yellowed paper. “And then sometimes they blow their brains out on the steps of the Justice building.”

Drumming her fingertips against her stomach, she tries to entice Charlotte down from her ribcage where she likes to wedge herself. Usually that’s Will’s job, but Mac isn’t exactly enamored with the idea of going downstairs to tell him that she went for her walk today alone for the first time in weeks and was immediately approached by a strange man who, “Cannot be trusted,” in Charlie’s exact words (underlined three times in red ink)--but the adrenaline rush from their encounter has their daughter doing very interesting things to her liver.

For some reason the name is familiar.

_Shep Pressman._

“Oh what has Mummy gotten herself into?” she murmurs, barely able to breathe when she flips over to the next page, revealing the Operation Genoa helo manifest.

How many times had she looked at it since the retraction?

“Not to be trusted… but he’ll be in touch.”

Within the hour she’s in Don’s office, passing off copies of the documents off to him and instructing him to choose a white team to vet the story anyway.

 

* * *

 

By the start of broadcast he’s spent a few hours trying to figure out what Don’s been working on, only to be shut out with stern (as stern as it gets from Don, anyway) warnings that Will should talk to _the boss_ if he really thinks he needs to know. (The staff’s unflinching loyalty to Mac is deeply heartwarming, although occasionally grating.) By the _end_ of broadcast he sees that Mac is falling asleep standing up which is a hazard for several reasons, most pressingly because her center of gravity has been shot for months.

So he takes her home rather than accost her into giving up the story.

(For five days before Christmas, their apartment is only sparsely decorated and not entirely by choice. Fourteen hour days and six-day weeks means that they had two options: concede to having not much more than a half-decorated tree and some garland or hire professionals, and there was no way in hell he was hiring a professional to decorate his home for Christmas.

Or, in Mac’s words, _You can take the farm boy out of Nebraska…_ )

Completely exhausted, she doesn’t make it any further than the living room, to collapse down onto the couch as well as she can at eight months pregnant. Chucking his briefcase in the general direction of the table in the foyer he follows her in. For a brief second her form is silhouetted in their dark apartment against the city lights streaming in through the window, her rounded form in stark outline. And then, carding her hands through her hair, she eases herself down into the cushions with a sigh.

“So on the scale of one to a marathon, how long was your d—?”

“I think someone is trying to give us stolen government documents again,” she says, cutting him off. “Or not stolen. Don and I haven’t figured that out yet. So possibly the distance and back from here to Venezuela.”

Will’s brain stutters into a halt, before the only words that could possibly fill his mouth appear.

“What the fuck?” Followed shortly by, “We’re keeping Neal away from this right?”

Mac laughs, leaning back into the sofa and staring pleadingly at the ceiling. “That would be correct.”

“Is that why you’re keeping _me_ away from it?” he asks, walking further into the living room. For a moment he considers turning on one of the lights but then decides against it, if it’s going to be the kind of night where all Mac does is crawl right into bed. Rounding around to the other side of the couch, he drops to his knees before her when he sees that she hasn’t yet removed her shoes. “Because we don’t have another fifty-three days to lose?”

His second question is posed a little more humorously, but the attempt at a joke falls flat.

“The source isn’t a leak.”

Carefully, he dislodges one of her shoes from her feet, letting it fall to the floor.

“At least I don’t think so,” she amends, still looking upwards. “But I don’t trust him. I didn’t trust Jerry and I didn’t trust Valenzuela and I let myself get convinced and I just—maybe the story is real but I don’t trust the source and I mean, I didn’t trust Lilly, and in the end that didn’t even matter since she decided to exercise her right to bear arms right into her prefrontal cortex.”

“When you say him—?”

“I mean a man.”

Her other shoe comes off, and carefully he places it next to the other one and then leans up forward, placing his hands on her thighs.

“Why don’t you trust him?”

Biting her lip she rolls her head forward to look at him. Then says nothing, clearly weighing what she should say for _just_ long enough to make him worry. So he watches her instead, quietly marveling at all that’s happened in the past six months; her hair is longer still, thicker and shinier and there’s a glow behind her skin and he knows from everything that he’s read that it’s just her body building more capillary beds to compensate for the increased blood flow through her veins. While he has no problems admitting that he thinks that MacKenzie is the most beautiful woman in the world, there’s something uniquely stunning about her full with their child, the black (he thinks she owns them in every color now, since mentioning that this particular dress doesn’t make her feel as big as a house) maternity wrap dress accenting every new curve.

Will would like to live in a world where she doesn’t have to work up until the moment she goes into labor, but he’s making an effort to accept more things as they come.

“Mac?”

One of her hands smooths over her belly, chasing one of Charlotte’s stubborn kicks that he can see without any need for touching. 

“Charlie kept files on all his sources,” she says, at last. “That’s what the locked filing cabinet was. Is. Nancy told me to keep anything that I wanted. I like to think that if he had retired then he would have left me his professional contacts, but—he’s one of Charlie’s government sources.”

The hair on the back of his neck stands up, but he tries to not let it show.

“Okay.”

Taking a shaky breath, Mac continues. “We hold in our hands the careers of two Senators, a Congressman, and three State Department workers. And so far it looks like everything I’ve been given is the real thing. Which is the terrifying part.”

“What’s the story?”

He could ease himself up onto the couch, but it’s almost easier like this, on his knees in the dark in front of her, his thumbs tracing circles into the insides of her thighs.

“Collusion with Middle East arms dealers through the support of a military contractor running a covert op out of Baghdad,” is her concise answer.

Nodding, he tries to remain level, figuring out the logistics of the story. “So we’re looking at the Defense Appropriations committees in both the House and the Senate.”

“Correct.”

“What’s the terrifying part?”

The story, is the logical answer. For anyone but his wife, that is.

“When I was going through his—the source’s—dossier in Charlie’s files, I came across several notations that he isn’t to be trusted anymore.” With a measured inhale she takes one of his hands off her thigh, folding their fingers together. “I came across the helo manifest for Operation Genoa.”

The instinct that had him on edge is now blaring alarm klaxons in his head.

“Shep Pressman.”

Confused, Mac’s head snaps up, her eyebrows knitting together.

“Wait—”

“It’s Shep Pressman fucking with you,” Will tells her, trying to sound as matter-of-fact as possible even if his voice is strung taut by something which might be fear but is definitely anger at the fact that Shep has decided that Mac is his newest mark. “This is a test.”

Wide-eyed, she reaches for his other hand. “I don’t—”

Ignoring the stiffness in his knees, he rises up off the floor to sit next to her on the couch. In the relative darkness, shadows line her face, but the whites of her eyes grow large. Unthinkingly, like routine, he places his hand on her stomach, letting her guide his palm to rest over where the baby is currently trying to extend her leg out into.

“He was both mine and Charlie’s source for Genoa," he explains slowly, licking his lips and trying to figure out how to explain _this_ one. “He played us off each other and orchestrated the whole thing once Jerry got the ball rolling, although I doubt he could have imagined Jerry going as far as to cut the goddamn tape to—he manufactured the helo manifest. He asked for a meet with me conveniently as I was getting too curious about the story you were hiding from me.”

Unblinking, Mac moves his hand to what he thinks might be Charlotte’s foot up near her ribs.

“What does he _want_ from me?” she asks, overly calm.

“He wanted to ruin Charlie,” he replies, trying to match her even tone, and failing. “And ACN.”

Saying nothing, Mac looks forward out the frontward facing windows of the living room, towards where if it wasn’t dark, there would be a view of Central Park. He knows her calm is just an appearance; her shoulders slump and the baby is increasingly agitated under their hands.

But he’s not calm either.

In-between the lines of their conversation, he’s trying to figure out the next steps, how he can go about protecting Mac and the baby and the rest of the team. How he can figure out what Shep wants now. How to keep him from getting it.

“Oh god,” she blurts out suddenly, turning to look at him.

“Mac?”

Her breathing quickens and become strained. So bracing his hands under her elbows, he helps her stand.

“I was alone today on my walk for the first time in _weeks_ ,” she says, voice urgent and words quick. “And he approached me, and I knew as soon as he walked off that he’s had to have been watching me. I’ve gotten myself into routine, and he was waiting for the day I wasn’t accompanied by you or Elliot or some other—”

“He came up to you in the park?”

Increasingly he’s reminded of Charlie’s terse warning to him as the Genoa story fell apart around them, about staying out of parking garages and maybe it starts with public parks, but he knows Mac and just where exactly she’ll go to chase a story.

“Yeah,” she answers shortly, her hands bracing themselves on his chest.

“Okay I’m really not just saying this because I know,” he says, his own hands resting at her non-existent waist. “I know you’ve been shot at and you’ve been stabbed and I know this is part of your job as President of ACN, I know Charlie did it, but this guy—Mac, this is not a good guy.”

“Neither was Lilly.”

Lilly was _disappointing._ And he knows she knows that, knows that MacKenzie is just holding onto a shred of her sense of security, and she’s allowed that, but right now Will is about to go out of his fucking mind.

The allure of telling Pruitt to go fuck himself and that Mac is starting maternity leave effective immediately is great.

Not that Mac would _let_ him, or that he even _would_.

He just wants them safe.

And now Mac has to know.

“Shep seriously considered killing Charlie,” he says, tugging her as close to him as he can with her belly between them. “From what Charlie told me. Instead he made sure Genoa got to air.”

Eyelids fluttering, her mouth drops open. He tries again at the usual brand of dark humor that lingers in most of their conversations.

“Although that might have _also_ have been to try to kill Charlie.”

 

* * *

 

 _He should have just thrown in his lot with Randy and Blair_ , she thinks, but doesn’t say. It’s been seven months, and they’ve all taken turns blaming themselves for one aspect of Charlie’s death or another, until Nancy, exasperated at the last, told them all that he had been told his liver wasn’t going to last another year anyway, and he wasn’t a viable transplant candidate by any means.

Not that it would have meant anything, if Shepard Pressman had put a bullet in Charlie’s chest.

“Why didn’t either of you _tell me this_ a year ago?” she cries, barely caring about the strain in her voice. “And better yet, _why,_ in the name of all that is holy, did he want to kill Charlie?”

Will swallows hard.

“I don’t know.”

There’s the corollary of course, of _why is he going after me?_ Although Mac supposes that as Charlie’s heir, she becomes the next in line for not only his ghosts but the skeletons too. Better to have Charlie’s sins visited on her rather than Katy or Sophie.

If not for the baby.

“Wait.”

Of course the name sounded familiar.

“What?”

“Pressman,” she mutters, stepping out of Will’s grasp and then back into it, grabbing his forearms when his hands move to frame her shoulders.  

He shakes his head. “I don’t—”

“David Pressman,” she says emphatically, even though she knows the name won’t register in Will’s memory. “He was one of our interns. He was fired for posting negative—for posting things about the show on the internet. I remember giving Neal the go ahead to fire him after Neal found out he was, after Jenna found the comments and then went to Neal with them—get me my phone.”

Will just stands there, and she repeats her directive, sighing.

“How do you remember that?”

With a slight shake of her head, she unlocks her BlackBerry and opens the web browser, and in seconds it’s all confirmed.

“David Pressman _died_ on August 24, 2011. _The rising Boston University sophomore is survived by his parents, Shepard and Linda Pressman of Alexandria, Virginia_ ,” she says, voice shaking more than she is inclined to admit. “When he worked for us, he had a sobriety chip. From Narcotics Anonymous,” she says slowly, letting her phone fall to rest against her side in unfeeling fingers. She _remembers_ David. “He was always flipping it in his fingers at his desk. He overdosed.”

“And Shep blamed Charlie,” Will finishes.

Trying to force her mind to reach another conclusion, she figures it again and again. And so does he, restrained panic tensing his features.

“And now he blames me,” she says before Will can. “The story’s real because he wants me to trust him. If he wanted to kill Charlie—”

He shakes his head forcibly, drawing her closer to him.

“But Charlie’s—”

Bitterly, she laughs. “And he changed his mind. But now it’s me.”

For a long moment they just look at each other.

Over a year after the retraction and a year since the lawsuit began, here they are with _yet another damn thing._ And they can’t go to Pruitt like they could have gone to Leona or Reese, Pruitt is nowhere near as powerful as AWM, and even if they did go to him, there’s the near-certainty that he would make some glib remark about how she’s expendable, and Will would finally haul off and knock Pruitt into next week.

The muscles in her body grow tight, her legs and arms locking up as she sets herself into a daze, mechanically working through how to protect herself.

Protect the baby.

(It’s funny. Just the other day she was thinking about how inside of her is the safest place for Charlotte to be, how she has no idea how she’s going to handle having her daughter in her arms, breathing in air that could get her sick and living in a world full of risk and chance. If only she could stay this way forever.

Except now inside her is probably the most dangerous place for their child.

If only she could give Charlotte to someone and tell them to run. That’s what godparents are for, right?)

Squeezing her biceps, Will lets go and brushes past her.

“Okay, I’m handling this.”

Without hesitation he crosses the room into the foyer, hoisting his briefcase off the ground and rummaging through it.

“Will?”

“My source spoke on the phone, remember?” he asks, nearly flippant.

Switching on the light, he waves his iPhone in her line of sight before scrolling through his contacts and placing a call, and there’s a lag in her mental processes, and it’s not until the call has gone to voicemail that MacKenzie processes that Will’s called Shep Pressman and—

“Stay the fuck away from MacKenzie McHale,” he snarls, his posture even now deceptively unmoved. “I don’t know what game you’re playing and I don’t care, but she’s not going to be in the middle of it.”

Reminding herself to breath, as hard as it is at this point, she cradles the round of her stomach with her hands.

“Whatever was between you and Charlie Skinner is dead and buried,” Will continues, tone low and measured. Mindlessly he spins his wedding ring on his finger, cradling the phone against his shoulder. “And I swear to _God_ if you touch a single hair on her head, I will call in every last favor left owed to me in Washington, and you will find yourself dumped on a freeway by some disgruntled CIA agent in the middle of fucking nowhere so burned that the intelligence community will have to sort through the ashes of your career. That’s a promise.”

Hanging up, he takes a deep breath, resting his forehead against the wall as she looks on helplessly.

Then he tosses the phone down onto the table in entryway, where it lands with a clatter.

“Will?”

The illuminated screen flickers and then goes dark. Staring at it as if daring it to ring, he contemplates the phone for a minute longer before lifting his head to look at her.

“Why did you go to Don instead of Jim?” he asks, like nothing has happened.

“Because if I went to Jim, you’d have gotten it out of him within the hour,” she answers quietly, and then smiles weakly. “He doesn’t know how to handle you like a man.”

She still feels tired but no longer tired enough to sleep. Just tired enough that all she wants to do is strip out of the clothes she’s been wearing since nine o’clock in the morning and curl up in bed.

Which is how they wind up doing exactly that.

“I thought the man-handling was strictly your job?”

Will’s hand sweeps up and down the curve of her hip, fingers spreading out over the newest crop of stretch marks on her stomach. She’s decided that it must be a male thing, him delighting in the permanent marks that their daughter will leave on her hips and abdomen. Albeit, he also delights in using them as an excuse to touch her stomach, rubbing endless amount of cocoa butter into her skin.

“Being president means I’ve had to learn to delegate,” she says, after she picks up the conversational thread again. “Besides, I think man-handling is what got us into this situation in the first place.”

Laughing lightly, Will kisses the back of her neck.

It’s not been a perfect world they’ve been living in, but the universe’s balancing act has been comforting enough to her the past few months. Will goes to prison, she gets pregnant. Charlie dies, and now—

Although, MacKenzie figures, she did have that six year stretch but that did end with her and Will getting engaged, so that too had a balance.

“He’s going to come after both of us now.”

And she does get it. Will went to prison for Neal, she knows how far he’ll go for their baby.

For her.

“I know I’ve held back from making the pregnancy brain jokes, but if you think that I’m not going to do everything I can to piss Shep off enough to go after me instead of you—”

“Yeah.”

She gets it.

His breath is warm in her ear and he kisses her neck, her bare shoulder, his hand coming up to cup her breast. Squirming back against him, she gasps when he rolls her nipple between his fingers. _Unfair._ The tenderness and pain from the first trimester has given way to oversensitivity, and he knows that all he has to do is tease her breasts, and this is far more than teasing with his teeth scraping along the tendon of her neck.

Then he stops.

“You didn’t give it to Don just because you don’t think I can be the white team, right—”

“You’re ridiculous,” she breathes, arching and reaching back to pull his hips into hers, moving against him until she feels him harden. “You do remember that Don was on the red team for Genoa, right? And so was Jim?”

His response has a distinct delay as he focuses on getting his fingers between her thighs.

“Okay.”

 

* * *

 

Desperate, MacKenzie rolls her hips forwards, circling as she tries to find the right angle. Which he knows isn’t possible at this point with her so stomach so big, so instead he braces one hand on her waist and fits his hand between them, rubbing his thumb over her clit until at last her rhythm stutters and she clenches down around him.

Will watches, a little in awe.

In theory he understands that at thirty-five weeks Mac’s uterus goes all the way up to her ribs, but the fact tends to take on new meaning when she’s orgasming on top of him, moaning out his name, legs shaking, breasts flushed and heavy. And then his own orgasm hits, and his mind goes blank until Mac rolls off of him and onto her side, panting.

Her eyes are closed, and he watches her face slide into soft satiation. Everything about her is softer, even as she folds parts of herself into tempered steel, fashioning herself into a weapon (a battle axe, maybe, some sort of melee weapon) to fight Pruitt. Mac protects all of them, day in and day out. She’s protected them through morning sickness and back pain and fatigue and headaches.

It’s his turn.

Humming, Mac blearily opens her eyes, smiling at him.

They both fall into an uneasy sleep not long after.

The rest of the weekend is deceptively calm. Neither of them particularly feel it, half because Shep doesn’t make contact in response to Will’s voicemail and half because they’re wondering if it would actually lessen their anxiety at all if he did.

More Christmas decorations are put up. _It’s a Wonderful Life_ is watched; Mac sobs, he pretends he’s not crying. Gifts (for family, to be Fedexed on Monday, and for the staff, to be handed out on Christmas Eve) are wrapped.

It feels like a rehearsal, in a way—next year they’ll have an eleven month old baby who they’ll set next to the tree to unwrap her mountain of presents and to make a general spectacle of a holiday he thinks he’s never actually _enjoyed_ , at least not until last year.

(In a way it’s comforting. Will’s never been good at believing he can _have_ things. Times can be good, like his father’s sojourns to Lancaster County Jail, and times can be bad, like separate foster homes because women who _let themselves be abused_ obviously cannot raise four children.

He doesn’t know how to _have_ but he knows how to protect.)

ACN weekend manages to only have one major screw-up, which Mac easily manages from her home office.

Monday seems set to be as equally calm, which is how Will knows to expect everything to fall apart.

Mac offers to forgo her afternoon walk, but he’s upstairs in her office to accompany her at promptly three. A lesser woman would shrink, he thinks, but Mac bites her lip, shrugs, and lets him help her into her coat.

“I suppose he won’t off us in a crowded park,” she murmurs, taking his arm as they circle the busy ice skating rink, her eyes on the enormous Christmas tree dwarfing the throng of seasonal tourists and lunch breaking New Yorkers. “Although standing this close to the skaters has me thinking he might pay someone to Tonya Harding you.”

Snorting, he kisses the top of her head and ignores the urge to check his watch.

Ten minutes, and then they can go back inside.

But they’re not deviating from routine. Shep may have them scared, but he’s not going to get the satisfaction of dictating where they go.

(Even if Will plans to avoid parking garages and alleyways for a long while.)

“You’d make a poor Nancy Kerrigan.”

Mac’s fingers dig into his forearm.

“You know, I was going to take the morning train back to DC, but then I decided you two needed a more personal send-off. I’m glad you decided to take your walk early today, MacKenzie. I have to be at Penn Station in twenty minutes, so I don’t have much time to spare.”

Shep leans against the railing of the ice skating rink, three or four feet from them. Will considers being shamelessly obvious by switching sides with Mac, positioning himself in front of her. Considers it, and then does it, staring down the grim smile on Shep’s face.

“You know, you’re right,” Shep says. “What’s between me and Charlie is dead and buried, and it’s deeply disappointing I didn’t get to be the one holding the shovel.”

“I’m afraid that honor went to Lucas Pruitt,” Mac says coolly, a reserved look on her face that he knows is hiding fear.  

Shep’s mouth folds into a straight line.

“I’ve spent the past few months learning quite a bit about you, MacKenzie. Your time embedded with the 7th Marines and MARSOC left an impressive paper trail.”

“Nothing as impressive as your time spent serving with Charlie in Vietnam.”

Shep flinches almost imperceptibly. “Did Will tell you how we met?”

“The White House,” Mac answers, tightening her hold on his arm. This weekend had been, if nothing else, an informative one. “We don’t keep secrets.”

“Of course not.”

She sighs. “What do you want?”

“Symmetry,” Shep answers shortly.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” Will asks, forcing himself to stare forward out onto the rink, watching happy couples and happy families whirl by, hands in other gloved hands. Children with chubby legs and parents holding onto them for dear life.

When he turns his head at last, Shep is looking at his cell phone. Expression inscrutable, he pockets the device before gesturing to a young couple trying to keep a bundled-up toddler upright on the ice.

“Children are so fragile, aren’t they? Doesn’t matter how old they are.”

_Of course._

Mac’s grip on his wrist in painful, and his fingers go numb. Every instinct in his body shouts at him to flee, but he’s paralyzed.

“I’ve learned that you, MacKenzie, have experience recovering from serious abdominal injury. I suppose it’s all well and good that you don’t keep secrets between you, otherwise I would have been hoping to get you somewhere where it was suitably dark and solitary in the next few weeks. Just close enough that you could have had it all. He almost made it to a hundred and twenty days, did you know that?”

When it becomes apparent that Shep expects an answer, Mac nods jerkily.

“I had considered having Charlie killed myself, and I regret missing that opportunity. The way I understand it, you’re the one who authorized David’s termination. Killing you would be—well, perhaps over the mark. You didn’t owe me anything,” he considers, tilting his head before continuing on. “But there’s a satisfaction to reciprocity,” he says with a shrug. “Merry Christmas.”

Then he disappears, leaving them frozen in the middle of the unceasing crowds.

 

* * *

 

She manages to remain sane for approximately long enough for her to call Molly and described the exact nature of what has just occurred, giving her Shep’s information in the hopes that someone, a handler or director or perhaps a sniper, can reign him in. Failing that, working with special ops has taught her how to disappear completely.

They’ll empty the accounts, go upstate. They both know how to shoot a gun. There’s a nine inch Marine regulation knife in her desk. Will keeps a baseball bat in the hall closet. Being raised on a farm around the cows and pigs and whatever the fuck else Will’s sprouted off in his rants has to mean he has some idea of how to deliver babies. They’ll disappear entirely until Charlotte’s born.

Panic sends her blood pressure skyrocketing, and she paces the apartment, one hand braced on her lower back and the other protectively resting over her belly, waiting for Molly to call her back with news.

“Its okay baby, Mummy’ll protect you,” she murmurs, her eyes blurring the soft yellow icicle lights hanging over the mantle and on the tree. “I won’t let anything bad happen.”

(She went home immediately, telling Pruitt that she wasn’t feeling well. Will put her in the apartment, set the alarm code, and told her to call him if anything changed. _We live in the third most secure residential building in Manhattan,_ he told her, and she wondered how much of it was to reassure her and how much was to reassure himself.

Either way, Charlotte kept kicking her the whole time, each elbow and knee pressed into her lungs and liver reassuring as adrenaline surged through her veins.

Moving parts, it seemed, a million moving pieces until she was inside the apartment, so still and quiet. Will came home immediately after broadcast.)

Will catches her hips on one of her passes, positioning her in front of him where he’s sitting stiffly on the couch, and pushes up the sweatshirt she stole from his closet to brush his lips against her stomach.

“We promise,” he whispers, and kisses her bare stomach again. “We’ll keep you safe.”

She laughs, so she doesn’t cry.

(They’ve argued over almost everything about the baby. The color on the nursery walls and whether to find out the sex before hand and which stroller will suit them best and what material the crib bedding should be. The only thing they settled on without going nine rounds was a _name._

Charles James for a boy, Charlotte Harper for a girl.

And now, at nearly midnight as they’re sitting in their apartment waiting for the clock to strike the beginning of Christmas Eve, it all washes away.

They need to protect her.)

Tugging her down to sit on his lap, Will wraps his arms all the way around her. In time, they find themselves slumped against the cushions, the silence in the apartment a disquiet that, in time, permits them to sleep.

 

* * *

 

Mac wakes up to a message from Molly on her phone and the information that Shep was burned by ONI and the CIA four months ago, or so says her contact with Naval Intelligence. Mac calls her back almost immediately and is advised to stay put and _not do anything stupid_ and that Molly will do her best to see to it that someone at ONI or NCIS gets eyes on Shep before the end of the day. Which she relates to him as he robotically makes them breakfast, intent on filling his pregnant wife with eggs and bacon and toast and anything else she can stomach at the moment.

The day passes by in a torturous fog.

Distracted, Mac spends the day circling the bullpen, sliding into her old role of his producer, and he watches her watch over the staff, jumping at every ringing phone, her face creasing with worry every time someone leaves her sight. The only bright spot is when Maggie appears midafternoon, wishing them all a happy holiday before planting herself at her old desk, seemingly intent on driving Jim insane.

The staff knows something is wrong. They just don’t know what.

But the day is uneventful, and he takes Mac home.

_Children are so fragile, aren’t they? Doesn’t matter how old they are._

Will knows exactly how fragile children are.

At eleven his phone rings, and when he picks it up, putting it on speaker, he can’t even get his name out before he can hear Jenna crying. The words _A man cornered me in my stairwell, and I think it’s related to the story we’re not supposed to know about_ are barely out of her mouth before he’s telling her to stay put and double check that her door is locked and not to let anyone in unless it’s him.

Mac says nothing, merely handing him her knife before letting him run out the door with his jacket half on.

 

* * *

 

She has the distinct urge to vomit. So instead she calls Jim and sends him to Jenna’s apartment as well before sending out an email to the staff, putting them all on lockdown and then calls Molly again, leaving her three frantic voicemails before finally getting a response.

“He’s going _after my staff now._ She lives in a fourth story walk-up, Molly! She’s barely twenty-three! For the love of _Christ!”_

“They’ve got his location, Mac, or approximately. He bought a ticket to DC on Monday but didn’t use it. He can’t be far.”

“That’s encouraging,” she cried, rubbing her hand across her forehead.

And it’s Jenna, of course it is, because she went to Neal and that means Neal is next and then Jim, and then Maggie shows up with Tess and Tamara and a vague explanation that Jim didn’t like that Mac was alone, and by the time Will and Jim show up with a shaken and pale Jenna, half the staff is in their living room.

“He was gone by the time we got there,” Will murmurs, following her as she leads Jenna into their bathroom to clean her face. “And she’s not the only one in a walk-up, Mac. We should offer to let people—”

“Already did.”

He nods. “I’ll call down to the doorman.”

Not that he leaves, but stands guard in the doorway as Mac wrings out a washcloth and hands it to Jenna before filling a cup with water and getting her ibuprofen to take. Mindlessly, she cups Jenna’s chin and says, “I guess you didn’t think this would happen when I asked you about your question at Northwestern?”

“Excuse me?” Will asks, crossing his arms.

“I’ve always been taking my instructions from her,” Jenna murmurs, something like laughter lighting her eyes.

But Will just looks at her, the look on face pure exasperation crossed with love. “Northwestern was a _test?”_

Mac does her best not to laugh, catching Jenna’s eye.

“And you passed.”

“And if I hadn’t?”

“I wouldn’t worry about that.”

“You wouldn’t have accepted the job?”

“Please, she was about to EP a daytime talk show called _Lunch_ ,” Jim says, appearing behind Will with her phone in his hand. Will balks, looking backwards, affronted at the mere notion. “It’s Molly Levy. I only answered because I figured—”

Excusing herself, Mac slips into the master suite, half listening to Molly explain that there are agents stationed outside their apartment, half listening to Jim needling Will about their pathetic attempt at decorating and Kendra’s determination to finish it and how many blankets they’ll need.

“Thank you,” she says, hanging up her phone again to Will looking at his phone and telling her that Don and Sloan are also on their way, not because they both don’t live in apartment buildings with doormen but because Sloan missed having a _real Christmas_ , whatever that means.

“Probably something about Herod wanting to kill the King of the Jews,” Will mutters, ushering her back into the living room where every available seat and a large portion of the floor has been taken up by the senior staff. “Though there’s enough room in this inn. Provided no one complains about sleeping on the floor, anyway.”

“Provided _this one_ isn’t born in time to play baby Jesus,” she mutters back.

"So really, Northwestern was a test?" he asks, his hand on the small of her back and his mouth much closer to her ear than it would normally be in front of their staff. But there's a guy out there who may or may not be entertaining the idea of maiming one or more of them, and they're in their own goddamn apartment, so Mac thinks it's okay that they've moved beyond hand-holding. 

She sighs. "You couldn't really have failed it. I mean... I was doing a lot of drinking back then, hadn't reported any news in five months, and was about to move to daytime television. And you  _passed_ , you paranoid neurotic. You let me produce you, even if you thought I was a delusion."

By the look on his face she’s knows he’s preparing to reply with something endearingly sweet, but anything he has to say is cut off by Gary sudden excited, “Look, it’s snowing!”

 

* * *

 

It continues through the night; by the time Will wakes up in the morning and checks his phone, the city has gotten almost half a foot. It’s nothing to the storms he’d wake up to as a child, but snow always makes him feel safer somehow. Snow meant that Dad was stranded at a bar, or a buddy’s house, or in town. A foot meant a day, two meant a day and a night, and during one memorable blizzard the house was quiet and calm for almost a week.

He creeps out of his and Mac’s bedroom, surveying his staff as they sleep curled up on couches and on the floor, pushes open the doors to the guest rooms where Don and Sloan are curled up on one bed, Jim and Maggie on the other. In a moment he writes off as channeling Mac, he looks intently at Tess and Gary all knotted together on the chaise lounge under a single blanket.

(All safe. All quiet, in the dim grey morning light.)

Then he grabs a stack of gifts from their hiding place in the office and pads quietly back into the master bedroom and crawls back on top of the bed, shaking Mac in a manner that in no way resembles an over-eager child.

She swats at him blindly, but smiles against his mouth when he leans down to kiss her awake.

What he has to give her doesn’t quite stack up to the voicemail from a Pentagon official promising _Mrs. McAvoy, we will have Shepard Pressman apprehended within the hour. Expect a full briefing later in the day, ma’am,_ but that doesn’t stop Mac from pulling him out of their bedroom by the hand wearing nothing but her pajamas and nearly half a million dollars in diamonds (her engagement ring not included) that minutes before was ensconced in Tiffany blue boxes.

And then chaos, once the staff wakes up and realizes they have presents to unwrap (he’s grateful for their single-minded forgetfulness the day before), and someone decides to cook breakfast for everyone which winds up with Martin and Jim and Gary heading out to the kosher grocery store down the block for enough eggs and turkey bacon and bagels to feed a small army, and it’s absolute insanity and nothing like the small Christmas with the baby Will was imagining for next year—

But he can definitely see it happening again.

Although hopefully without King Herod’s campaign of terror.

Outside the world is still and cold, but inside the family is here and Mac’s smile is bright as she argues with Jim over something that might be powdered eggs and Christmas in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

There are others to fight, still.

But Will lets his world be peaceful for a little while longer.

 

* * *

 

 _It came upon the midnight clear,_  
_That glorious song of old,_  
_From angels bending near the earth,_  
_To touch their harps of gold:_  
_"Peace on the earth, goodwill to men,_  
_From heaven's all-gracious King."_  
_The world in solemn stillness lay,  
_ _To hear the angels sing._

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I hope that all of you who celebrate are having a merry Christmas.


End file.
